Currently, pharmacy printers print information about a medicine on a medicine label for distribution to the consumer along with the corresponding medicine. Often, the label is designed to be fixed to packaging for the medicine. The medicine label is generated after the consumer orders the medicine and prior to when the consumer receives the medicine. Systems for printing a medicine label and related advisory information are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,304,849 entitled “Method and system for printing a combination pharmaceutical label and directed newsletter”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,240,394 entitled “Method and apparatus for automatically generating advisory information for pharmacy patients”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,524 “Method and system for automatically generating advisory information for pharmacy patients along with normally transmitted data” all of which name Baxter Byerly as an inventor, and the teachings of which are all incorporated herein by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,729,666 describes conventional processes for generating, in a computer associated with a printer, print files containing font header data enabling the printer to render fonts, and then the computer transmitting the print file to the printer for printing.
A medicine prescription label may include patient name, doctor name, drug expiration date, the name of the drug, the manufacturer of the drug, instructions for taking the drug, the quantity in the bottle, the number of refills, the date of fill, the day the prescription was written, history or medical record number, the prescription number, the name of the pharmacy, the address of the pharmacy, the phone number of the pharmacy, cautions or warnings.